When a Moron Starts to Think
by luthien-yavetil
Summary: ONESHOT  Wheatley is in space. Space is boring. Boring is a good opportunity to start thinking, even when the things you think about hurt you the most.


_"I'm in space. Hey you. You over there. SPACE! We're in space!" _

"Yes, we're in space, mate," Wheatley replied drably. His fellow personality core drifted around and around him, almost as if it had its own orbit around the little blue sphere.

He wasn't complaining – at least, not anymore. Crazy company was better than no company at all, in some cases. And how was he supposed to get rid of the core anyhow? Not like he could shove him aside, and even if he told it to 'bug off', he doubted the core listened to a thing he said.

He gave up counting the years since the… 'incident'. And no doubt now he regretted it. What in the world had he been _thinking? _That human – that _stinky, mute, fatty, no-good adopted lunatic of a human… _

She was his best friend, and he tried to kill her.

There was no use denying it. What he did was _stupid, selfish_, and… stupid. And what was worse that he couldn't tell himself he 'didn't _mean_' for it to happen. No, he had meant every bit of what he said, which made it all the more terrible. He sighed.

The thing about being in space that, save the sun, moon, stars, occasional Mars, and (naturally) the Planet Earth, there wasn't much to look at. This made it all the easier for his internal programming, in the event of low levels of personality activity (aka, boredom), to automatically activate selected data files that led the core to feel its default personality to its greatest extent, keeping his systems up and functional.

Unfortunately, and perhaps ironically, those looping data files were the moments when he had been _this close _to murdering the only soul who never took him for stupid – who trusted him, and followed his advice time and time again. The elevator catastrophe. The smashy-spike plate. And, for god's sake, the 'This-is-the-part-where-I-kill-you' madness.

These were the events that, as he looked back, convinced him more than ever that 'she'… was right. He was a moron.

"This is sick…" his voice chip said softly to himself. "Nothing more than a sick, cosmic joke… Kudos to you, big guy. You admitted it. Admitting it is the first step to acceptance. Accept it. You're an idiot. A big, mad moron. You deserve this. Yeah, yep, you do. Everything would be _sooo_ much better without you. Really."

He sighed again. He'd been doing a lot of sighing since he got sent up here.

He could just imagine her face if she could see him now. Not the mean, yellow computer lady – the stinky human. She wouldn't be smiling. She was too kind for that. Maybe the brain-damage permanently removed her of meanness. All he knew was that, despite everything he did to her, she could take a good look at him in his powerless core body, pick him up by the handlebars at his sides, and…

… haul him inside a space ship?

Wheatley had to blink. Although he was a robot and didn't need to, sure, he knew he just _had_ to. Because in one moment he had been floating aimlessly in space, and in the next an astronaut was twisting the wheel of a hatch shut with one arm, and underneath the other the blinking personality core. Maybe an asteroid hit him or something, and now he was as corrupted and mad as poor Space Core outside.

But no, it dawned on him. This was real.

The astronaut meant to set him down on a sort of pod, but because of the lack of gravity he ended up sort of hovering loosely instead. Firstly, the human busied with unlatching the safety harness attached to the space suit.

Whenever Wheatley came across something mind-boggling or intimidating, he had this sort of reflex that would help ease the tension a bit.

"W-Wow, nice place you got here! Sleek, white… Love what you done with the place. Really. Ah… You see that little guy out there, twirling around? Yeah, better not go disturbing him anytime soon. He's having the time of his life, honestly. Happy, happy little guy, he is. Bit crazy, really. Nope, wait, _really _crazy, I mean. It's true!"

He was babbling now, he knew it. The astronaut stayed silent, going over to a huge monitor and touching the screen, for some reason. It seemed to activate a kind of gravity mode, for he watched as objects around the room began to drop to the floor of the ship, one-by-one.

Then Wheatley realized something dreadful. In that one dropping instant, he was all too ready to break out into hysterical screaming.

And then the astronaut caught him. Then, carefully and gingerly, the person set him properly this time on the pod, slightly bowl-shaped to prevent him from rolling off.

For once, Wheatley was speechless. It was only a few seconds later, after the astronaut had taken off her helmet and exposed that same smiling and kind face, that his processers of his mind began to whir again.

"_You caught me." _

* * *

><p>There was supposed to be a backstory in this where Chell only got to be an astronaut because a hospital granted her dying wish (I never imagined she would survive all the crazy super-conductor gel what-not tests of Aperture for long, anyway). She figured to go to space, save Wheatley, die, and once the humans on earth notice her vitals are gone, they'll bring the space pod down and Wheatley would be saved from SPAAAAAAACE.<p>

At least, until Wheatley finds out her reasons, plugs himself into a satellite after redirecting the ship, and alerting GLaDOS to bring the ship back to earth so she could kill him. Then Chell returns to Aperture, a cure is found, and Chell manages to get GLaDOS _not _to kill Wheatley. YAY HAPPY ENDING ANYWAY.

… But the oneshot wouldn't be as short with all that backstory, so it was scrapped. You get to read about it here anyway, though. Nyeh.


End file.
